Irish Nationalist Leader Downplays White House Snub

He got treated no different then your average Democrat would!

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams says he does not feel slighted by President Bush, despite failing to receive an invitation to the White House during a visit to the United States last week.

It had become an annual tradition: inviting leaders and dignitaries from Northern Ireland to the White House on Saint Patrick's Day, which honors Ireland's patron saint.

But last Thursday Gerry Adams was kept at arm's length by the president. Mr. Bush met instead with the five sisters of a Belfast man, Robert McCartney, who was allegedly killed by members of the Irish Republican Army in January.

Mr. Adams, who heads the political wing of the paramilitary group, spoke on ABC's This Week program.

"I do not feel snubbed," said Gerry Adams. "And if the dis-invite of the Irish parties meant a stepping back from the process by the Bush administration, I would be very concerned. But it does not."

more...

http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-03-20-voa36.cfm

Clinton did such a great job on this, just masterful. It would have just taken the least bit of attention by * and his clown possee.

Oh well.

amid allegations of IRA interference in the political process
and its refusal to disarm, a key point of the peace
agreement.

A landmark settlement, the Good Friday Agreement of April
10, 1998, came after 19 months of intensive negotiations.
The accord called for Protestants to share political power
with the minority Catholics, and it gave the Republic of Ireland
a voice in Northern Irish affairs. In turn, Catholics were
to suspend the goal of a united Ireland—a territorial claim
that was the raison d'être of the IRA and was written into the
Irish Republic's constitution—unless the largely Protestant
North voted in favor of such an arrangement, an
unlikely
occurrence.

June 1999 the peace process again hit an impasse when
the IRA refused to disarm prior to the assembly of
Northern Ireland's new provincial cabinet. Sinn Fein insisted
the IRA would only begin giving up its illegal weapons after
the formation of the new government; Unionists
demanded disarmament first. As a result, the Ulster
Unionists boycotted the assembly session that would
have nominated the cabinet to run the new coalition
government. The nascent Northern Irish government
was stillborn in July 1999.

The problem they have is that the government
proposals
are hints and suggestions rather than specific
promises.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108101.html

March 5, 2005 poll

in comparison to the pre-election poll in 2003, Sinn Fein
have maintained the same level of support and the SDLP
have dropped two
points.

http://www.irlnet.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t7434.html

Conclusion-when the occupiers of NI
are ready to negotiate again, Sinn Fein, kept in the
game by the fact of the IRA, will be ready.

Time is on our side.

A few more nailbombs will do the trick.

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Why would it be not OK for the Democratic party to have a private army that nailbombed shopping centers jmcgowanjm ?

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I thought you had everything ready to cut and paste, or do you keep just the things that that attempt to legitimise terrorism ?

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"Mr Paisley and the three governments hope to have the IRA agree to renounce all criminality, preferably before the next round of negotiations begins. The ideal would be a declaration from the IRA that it is disbanding. The high-level strategy is therefore to use the McCartney campaign to batter republicans into making extensive concessions."

They're bargaining. It's not expected the IRA will actually disband.

From my link on the post that nobody's answered yet!
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=622168

The various parties will continue to hash it out in the North--no matter what Bush & his poodle think. Setting parts of the working class against each other is an old colonial tool. Descendants of some Ulster Protestants who escaped to the Southern USA were encouraged to hate African-Americans rather than band with them to fight the corrupt landowners & mill owners. (Racism had certainly existed in the South, but Jim Crow laws were not enacted until late in the 19th century.) And, of course, those Sunni & Shia must be saved from each other by the Coalition of the Willing!

"Why would it be not OK for the Democratic party to have a private army that nailbombed shopping centers....?"

:wtf:

Why is it not OK for an organisation that claims to be a serious political party to have a private army that smuggles, robs, extorts and murders ?

a trip to Paris with a mysterious incurable illness.

but what awaits the McCartneys in Belfast?" From that radical journal, the Belfast Telegraph:

They have met the most powerful man in the world and told him their story. But as the sisters and partner of the murdered Belfast man Robert McCartney travel home today from America, they will be wondering what exactly their high-profile visit to the White House has actually achieved.

True, the US President can now put six human faces to a problem he has largely ignored so far. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein and a regular visitor to the White House on St Patrick's Day, did not get an invitation this time. And the IRA has fewer supporters in the States than it did a week ago - before the articulate sisters told their story and challenged misty-eyed Irish Americans to give up their support for armed struggle.......For all their talking, the McCartney women are no closer to what they really want: convictions for the men who killed their brother.......

Yet, underneath all the furore, the central, underlying assumption of the peace process remains unaltered: that it will continue with republican participation, and that Sinn Fein and Mr Paisley will, sooner or later, get back to the table to hammer out agreement on a new Belfast administration.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=622168

Those expecting the imminent demise of Gerry Adams will be sorely disappointed.